APB Reloaded Screenshots Show Men, Guns

And now, some guns! GamersFirst have released the first few screenshots of APB Reloaded, their upcoming free-to-play reboot of Realtime Worlds’ cops’n’robber MMOG. There are four of these shots, all showing a man enjoying a day out with his gun. The screenshots accompany a long blog post from designer Zak Littwin (previously the QA Lead at Realtime Worlds) detailing just some of the changes coming in the game. Not convinced? You might be after you read the quotes I’ve pulled from the post below.
Zak Littwin, he says

“Over in the Gameplay department, during Closed Beta the first thing you will notice is the change to weapon implementations. While previously the game was fairly well balanced (apart from a couple of weapons), the combat model wasn’t particularly fun in a lot of situations, with weapons not feeling very meaty (though the recoil addition in 1.4.1 helped somewhat). In Closed Beta to fix this, we’ve upped initial damage on all weapons, adjusted recoil for most weapons, and changed accuracy so the weapon very quickly blooms out to its minimum accuracy, but regains it very quickly once you stop firing.”

and

“During Closed Beta most vehicles have not changed dramatically, though a few vehicles have changed significantly. The biggest change is the removal of the “Han Cellente,” ie. the starting vehicle. We thought it looked pretty awful and handled terribly, leading many to concludes that cars sucked in general (when in fact, they had just been given a really badly behaved one to start with). Instead we have inserted another vehicle as the starter car that looks a lot nicer, and that has pretty decent handling. We have modified how this new starter vehicle operates and with a couple of tweaks we’re left with a cute little 2-door coupe that handles well, is stable and responsive, but not too fast (maybe not a very macho car, but that’s why you will be upgrading at some point).”

and

“We’ve done a lot of work with changing the progression system ahead of Closed Beta. Progression was really convoluted before, with rewards at seemingly random points, and it had some strange mechanics that needed a lot of explaining by game prompts. Additionally in-game money pricing structure on some of the game items resulted in massive run-away economy problems… The first thing we did was remove organisation standing. It was a fairly obtuse mechanic that didn’t really fit into the game very well. Then we adjusted the contacts so they each fall under the category of either Weapons contacts or Vehicle contacts. As the names suggest – vehicle contacts unlock new vehicles, vehicle upgrades, and vehicle components, while weapons contacts now unlock preset weapons and character upgrades. All contacts unlock preset and customisable clothing options.”

and

“In a future post I will discuss subsequent changes planned for Open Beta and Live (the maps and complete game system changes I hinted at in the top of the post – since THAT will be truly revolutionary to the overall game play for the entire game), but for now I’ll leave you with some screenshots of the updated game highlighting a couple of the weather changes we have added (plus some of the new weapons we’re adding).”